The MAN Behind The Armor
Note: All pieces of information coming directly from Fraggers will come noted by the following. *''FRAGGERS:* ''in order to make searching for quotes easier and differentiate user ideas from official information. We had the great pleasure of obtaining information directly from The Fragnostic. He was kind enough to go through a series of questions and tell us a few things about himself and his channel. As per Fraggers' request in "FRANKENSTEIN: THE MONSTER RETURNS (NES/1990) | Retro Rumble #9" at 31:08 (https://youtu.be/kNhFM2q-54g?t=31m8sg), when thanked or credited, he would like to be referred to as "Pegasus Abortion". Many thanks to you, good sir! Our wiki is more complete due to the great efforts of Mr. Pegasus Abortion! Who Is The Fragnostic? *''FRAGGERS:*'' "My real name's Rob (short for Robert) and I'm 30 years old, born in June of '86 in Holme Valley, West Yorkshire, UK. My family jumped between London and Yorkshire a lot when I was growing up which is where my slightly unusual accent comes from. I met my girlfriend Maria (a.k.a Mrs. Fraggers) when I was 26, settled down with her here in Essex and had a couple of kids very, very quickly. There was actually a point where she'd spent more of our relationship pregnant than not, hahaha. We've got a boy and a girl, both still under three years old, named Harrison and April. When I was a kid, I wanted to be either an archaeologist or to play video games for a living. My granddad used to take me to the Natural History Museum in London a lot to look at the dinosaurs. I got taken to see Jurassic Park in the cinema when it came out which cemented a lifelong love of dinosaurs and prehistory. The T-Rex attack scared the life out of me and I had nightmares about it for at least a year afterwards. I wanted to get into YouTube much, much sooner than I actually did. The first guy that I saw doing this kind of thing was James Rolfe (AVGN) who, to this day, is still a massive influence on me. I was originally going to be just like him and produce a series mainly on horror games that covered entire franchises or themes in hour-long episodes but I was still fairly young and non-committal about it. I was way too busy drinking and getting high to concentrate on writing and producing something on that scale. Finally (about a year and a half ago now- wow, really seems longer!) I grabbed myself a cheap microphone and went with a format that seemed more natural to me which was on-the-fly commentary. The second video I did was Red Lake which got to be quite popular on Steam and netted me my first real jobload of subscribers to the channel. I think what really pushed me to take the plunge with it was reading an article on how many millions of dollars PewDiePie was making that year. I didn't (and still don't) have any delusions about this gig making me a millionaire or anything but I thought 'Hey, if I could even make a fair wage doing what he does, I'd be pretty ecstatic with that'. When I'm not shouting or making withering comments at awful games, I'm usually either playing with my kids, playing guitar (which I picked up when I was about ten years old), watching horror movies (which I started watching at a roughly similar age) or destroying my girlfriend at board games." The Youtube Career *''FRAGGERS:*'' "When I first started the channel, it was just doing horror movie reviews and it was so horrifyingly awkward that I honestly find it painful to watch nowadays. I had no idea how to be in front of a camera or a microphone, I didn't know the first thing about editing, it was just an improvised mess. Everything was pre-written back then which I used to find incredibly boring. I pre-wrote a couple of commentary tracks back before I started as The Fragnostic and I just found the whole process exhausting. I hate writing more than I hate editing and it just came out incredibly forced and unnatural. I did a video for Dying Light and one of my friends looked at it and said 'You're way funnier when you don't write everything you say' so I stopped doing it and have stuck to freestyle commentary ever since. Even when I'm doing stuff like The Holy Truth or more formal reviews of games, I'm generally working from a very rough sketch of notes and topics just so I don't miss anything out, before editing together about half an hour of rambling into a coherent review and very occasionally re-dubbing a couple of lines into something cleaner and more to the point. The entire 'Fragnostic' persona came about when I decided that I wanted to move away from the film reviews into gaming. First I used my original (awful) persona, The Hatmonger, before coming up with the idea of this image of a holy crusader that battles evil horror games. I was looking for something that would be easily brandable to help me to stand out from the thousands of other gaming channels on YT and that idea was the best of a fairly rotten bunch. Early on, I was kind of in two minds about whether to fully roleplay the entire scenario, as a knight with a backstory, or just to carry the imagery with me and have a bit of fun with it in the comments section. I decided to keep it low key; I was pretty much just learning to commentate back then and I found it taxing enough without trying to keep my head in an overelaborate role. The series titles didn't come until quite late in. Originally, everything was just labelled as 'The Fragnostic Vs....' but as I made more of an effort to theme the channel, I started to develop different ideas for shows as well. Let's Slay seemed like a pretty obvious one and I was pleasantly shocked to find out that nobody else had really used it so that was in. The Holy Truth started out as '2 Sick 2 Play' where I retrospectively reviewed a few games that I'd been too sick to commentate on for a week or so. Everybody got on with the format so I renamed it and carried it on. I'm still not particularly fond of the name. It's meant to be a play on the phrase 'The Whole Truth' but it's kind of shitty and I don't think anybody gets it. But whatever, no point in changing it now. Those are really the two mainstays. The Indiequisition is something I wish I had more time to do, more because I like the title than anything I think, haha. But I'm always chopping and changing series around depending on how they do or don't work. Endgame was a lot of fun but I don't think there'll be a second season of it anytime soon. The first one had some truly atrocious games in it and the finale with Red Lake is maybe one of my favourite videos that I've ever made. A second season would be kind of anticlimactic next to that. The Fragnostic as an onscreen persona versus me as an everyday person has a few contrasts. Obviously, my first priority when I'm making content for the channel is to entertain so it's really just me dialled up to eleven. As a person, I'm a lot quieter, a lot softer spoken and a great deal nicer and more polite than I am onscreen, haha. I'm awful at casual conversation and general small talk. I genuinely fear a scenario where I might be recognised in the street one day. I have a lot of friends and people I know but a lot of them are people I knew back when I was younger and drinking a lot. Back then, alcohol and drugs kind of gave me a personality. Since I've cut them out, I find it a lot harder to tolerate or talk to anybody that isn't directly in my family. It's kind of a relief to be The Fragnostic some days. I can just disengage from myself, turn my brain off and let shit happen." TallerDarkerStranger *''FRAGGERS:*'' "TallerDarkerStranger... that's really kind of a relic left over from when I used to do movie reviews and that was really just the name I ran with. I think, in the beginning, I wanted to cover ALL aspects of horror, from movies to games to board games to books but, as it usually does, my ambition kind of got the better of me in terms of time available. Eventually, I came up with the whole Fragnostic shtick and ran with that because it was more of a personable brand but I've hung onto the TDS idea for maybe longer than I should have done, almost like a production company more than anything. Not sure what I'll do with it in the future. The name was honestly nothing more than me dicking about with some wordplay in exactly the same way I came up with 'Fragnostic', haha." Sir Durbadae *''FRAGGERS:*'' "Durbadae and Huxley first came about in the Amnesia: The Dark Descent videos and I had absolutely no plans or pre-conceived notions that I was going to create either of them when I started recording. Over the course of about half an hour, I went from talking in a stupid voice (which I achieve by kind of mixing Christopher Lee with a bit of Sean Connery) about drinking too much to having a manservant and a mansion and god knows what else, haha. It was popular so I carried it on in the next video before I brought it back once for the entirety of a separate review and then again as an experiment to see if I could simultaneously commentate in two voices at once. I do sort of make up the backstory as I go along. Very little is concrete at the minute other than his character; Durbadae is an obvious alcoholic and drug addict, accompanied everywhere by his faithful but silent manservant Huxley, a large handsome man with formidable combat and survival skills picked up in his days in the British Army. Durbadae1 is a repressed homosexual who constantly lusts after his companion but will fly into a rage if he is accused of it. Although he is a monstrous deviant, he is also a devout believer in God and is constantly baffled and terrified by anything he deems 'unnatural' or 'occult' such as computers, small dogs and women. For somebody that's grown to be so popular, it's weird to think he's only actually made four appearances in anything. I'll have to bring him back for something soon." Category:Trivia